Deep Water (17 page)

‘Can I have a tail and a paw to keep?’ asked Justin.

The two rabbits which Rose was skinning on the kitchen table looked pink and purple and shockingly naked as she stripped away their fur.

Rose glanced at the boy suspiciously. ‘Why do ’ee be wanting they?’

‘Witch doctors have paws and stuff.’

‘Don’t let him have them,’ urged Leo, rolling his eyes as if to indicate that Justin was crazy. ‘Anyway, witch doctors don’t have paws, they have claws.’

‘A fat lot you know,’ muttered Justin.

‘I don’t hold with no spells,’ Rose told Justin fiercely. ‘And don’t ’ee go thinkin’ they won’t stink without preservin’.’

Even when Justin promised to keep them outside in the garden, Rose still refused to listen. But her expression softened slightly as she took in his
disappointment
. ‘Tell you what tho’, my dearie, ef you want to go catchin’ lil crabs, I’ll give ’ee bacon
rind for your lines. You can catch ’em by the ol’ harbour wall.’

Justin accepted some rind with a bad grace, and then said sharply, ‘I’ve a bone to pick with you, Rose. You should have asked before borrowing my bike.’

‘
I
didn’ take it.’

‘Someone did; after supper or in the night.’

‘Stole it?’

‘Borrowed. I told you that.’

‘’Twasn’ me, stupid.’

‘You could have used it to go and see a boyfriend in another village.’ Justin was blushing with
irritation
and embarrassment.

‘Well I don’ have a boyfriend or a man friend, you cheeky pup.’

‘Maybe a witch took the bike,’ suggested Leo.

‘Witch doctor, more like,’ said Rose.

Justin did not stay to hear more but stalked out of the room, slamming the door.

‘Did
you
play a joke on ’im?’ asked Rose,
smiling
mischievously and looking very pretty, thought Leo, despite her funny old-fashioned bonnet and long dress.

‘Of course not. I could play a better joke than that, if I wanted,’ he declared grandly.

Rose let out a peal of laughter. ‘He didn’ half get angry though.’

Rather flattered by her amusement, Leo felt
confident
enough to tell her that she need not expect him to eat her rabbit stew unless she cut the meat off the bones.

‘This time, I’ll do it. And ef you keep playin’
jokes, you won’t need to be frighted of no bones again.’

‘He can be a dratted nuisance sometimes,’
muttered
Leo, having just realised that Justin had said something extremely worrying.

On entering the garden, Leo was surprised to see his friend clapping his hands to chase off some cackling jackdaws, apparently robbing a nest in the elm. To see Justin – the killer of sparrows – helping other small birds surprised Leo, but not enough to divert him from the question that was making his heart thump. He walked across to Justin, and asked straight out, ‘What makes you think someone borrowed your bike?’

Justin seemed to be about to speak, but then lowered his eyes and kicked at the dying foliage of some daffodils. ‘I only said it to annoy Rose.’

‘You
invented
it?’ cried Leo.

‘Are you deaf. I said,
Y
-
E
-
S
. Comprendo?’

Leo followed Justin almost to the house as he strode away, but then decided against arguing with him. He didn’t believe what Justin had just said, but there were still too many days left of the holidays to risk a big row.

*

Andrea woke and immediately closed her eyes again, cocooning herself in the warmth of recollected
pleasure
. But almost at once she stirred and sat up. Oh God! Sunlight was stabbing through the gap in the curtains, casting a bright rectangle on the faded rug by her bed. She had set her alarm for eight and had gone back to sleep again, seconds after stopping it.
Dazed with lack of sleep, she swung her legs to the floor. If she dressed at once, the boys might never know that she had slept in. On several other mornings she had eaten breakfast before them, so, today, if she could slip out into the lane without being seen, and then return, they would think she had been awake for hours. She struggled into a sweater and a pair of slacks, and was brushing her hair when she remembered something. What a fool she’d been not to lower the bicycle seat before going to bed.

From the stairs she saw the machine resting against the wall. Had it been moved a few feet down the hall since she’d placed it there before dawn? Impossible to say. At night everything looked different. To get the spanner was the work of moments; but where were Leo and Justin right now? She could hear Rose moving about in the kitchen. What could she say to explain herself if any of them saw her tinkering with the saddle? No excuses came to mind. But what the hell; it had to be done. Her hands remained impressively steady as she made the adjustment and pressed down the saddle, fixing it in about a minute. How
could
she have neglected to do the one thing that mattered? She replaced the spanner in the tool box, and stood for moment in dazed self-reproach. At that moment the boys came in from the garden.

‘Are you guys going any place this morning?’ she asked, hoping to pre-empt speculation about where she had been while they’d been eating breakfast.

‘We’re going to catch crabs in the harbour,’ said Leo, as if announcing an impossibly boring activity.

‘Aren’t they caught in pots?’ asked Andrea
pleasantly
.

‘We’re only after the small ones that hang out under stones.’

‘And eat rotten fish and rubbish in the harbour,’ added Justin.

‘Chacun
à
son
goût,’
laughed Andrea,
following
them out into the lane with their bicycles. As Justin swung his leg over the saddle and mounted, she saw his look of amazement. Oh Jesus, he’d already noticed that the seat had been raised. Her surreptitious readjustment would only have
emphasised
the significance of his discovery. She waited, desparingly, for him to denounce her. But, after glancing at her for a moment, he looked away. He knows, she thought. He knows.

Until they cleared the Lizard, conditions had been ideal, with pale unbroken cloud concealing them from enemy aircaft and a choppy sea preventing the formation of a long and easily spotted wash. But below the headland, Mike could already make out, through his binoculars, a line of jagged peaks with breaking crests, and, above them, darker clouds rolling in from the west like damp ink stains seeping across the sky. Though reckoning the forecast of Force 5, gusting 6, would prove an underestimation, he was eager not to reduce speed before nightfall. So
Luciole
was throbbing along at almost twenty knots as she reached the top of the first big swell. She hung suspended for a moment at the crest, her screw out of the water and racing, before she hurtled down the wave’s smooth slope. Mike’s stomach was left behind long before the fishing boat’s bow hit the hollow of the wave. Out on the narrow bridge in front of the wheelhouse, wearing a Breton fisherman’s canvas smock rather than an oilskin,
Mike saw the green and white curtain tumbling downwards. Soaked and spitting out salt water, he shook his hair like a dog, swearing aloud as a cold trickle reached his boots via the small of his back and his trouser legs.

Tony Cassilis grinned at him as he burst into the wheelhouse.

‘Bad luck, skip.’

‘Better take this sea more on our beam, Number One,’ said Mike, trying not to sound reproachful, since he had not seen the wave coming either.

‘Starboard 5,’ Cassilis grunted to the coxswain.

‘Starboard 5, sir.’

Tony studied the swinging compass. ‘Steer 170.’

‘Course 170, sir.’

Looking at his imperturbable first lieutenant, Mike knew that, despite appearances, Tony would already be worried about the conditions they might face when making their rendezvous. After all,
he
would be the officer going ashore in the dory to contact the four agents and eighteen airmen, now supposedly waiting on a small island to the west of L’Aber Wrac’h inlet. If Mike’s navigating officer could manage to find Le Petit Tuyau – a twisting and extremely narrow channel fringed by submerged rocks – they could anchor in the lee of Beguen Island, enabling Tony to steer for the beach without fear of his dory being swamped by breakers.

Luciole
was not really large enough to carry back to England a party of more than twenty people in rough weather. In any case, her dory and smaller pram dinghy could, between them, only
accommodate seven passengers at a time,
necessitateing
four journeys to the beach and back if the whole party were to be embarked. For this reason, an
MGB
was keeping station a few cables to starboard. To start with, the gunboat would remain five miles offshore, while
Luciole
– less likely, in her Breton colours, to attract German interest – would go in close to locate the escapers. A signal on the secure S-phone radio link would then summon the gunboat and her launch to collect the airmen, while
Luciole
took on board the agents. Without the darkness, the blacked out buoys, the enemy forts, and the reef-strewn approaches, the plan would have been almost straightforward.

As always at the start of a mission, Mike turned his back on all predictions. Instead, during successive crossings he strove to empty his mind and enter a state of impersonal watchfulness. From this mental sanctuary, only a change in the engines’ rhythm, an unexplained light or shape, could rouse him to action. But, as dusk fell – and the two Beaufighters that had given daylight air cover flew northwards – Mike’s anxieties about Andrea denied him his usual inner calm. By offering to tell her son about them in the summer, she would only have meant to prove the strength of her love. But since his own future was so uncertain, her pledge merely reminded him of this.

Living from day to day was the best Mike could manage, and what was wrong with that? Thoughts of the moonlit school room and the touch of her pale smooth body made him feel weak with happiness, even standing in the cramped wheelhouse with the
bulky coxswain by his side and the smell of bilge water in his nostrils.

Two months earlier, Mike had brought back his first boatload of airmen from France. As British raids on the U-boat pens at Lorient intensified, more and more bombers were shot down over Brittany. Soon Mike’s rescue missions doubled. The ramifications were endless, and not just for him. Local farmers were stretched to the limit concealing these
dangerous
airborne guests from the Gestapo. Agents and resistance groups suffered from increased German vigilance. And when life became more hazardous for returning agents, it became more hazardous for Mike. For everyone’s sake, the airmen had to be rescued as quickly as possible. The more they were ferried about from barn to barn, the greater the chances of a dropped cap or brass button betraying them. And if that happened, their rescuers could easily sail into a storm of gunfire on the rendezvous beach.

At the back of the wheelhouse, Mike pulled back the curtain concealing his navigator’s fat but
neurotically
restless figure. Over the chart table a bulb burned almost as dimly as the glow from the
helmsman
’s compass. As usual, Tom Bruce had prepared a graph of the heights above or below water of the major rocks on their track at different times. In a few hours, when Mike saw white foam boiling close to the ship’s hull, he would put his trust in his navigator, unless Pierre Norbert became hysterical. In which case Tom, who was on excellent terms with the Breton, would still demand angrily of Mike
whether he preferred the opinions of ‘an ignorant French fisherman’ to those of a man who had been navigating officer on a destroyer.

Shortly before midnight, the bridge lookout thrust his head round the wheelhouse door.

‘Light flashing Red 30, sir.’

Mike noted down a bearing and handed it back to Tom, who replied, almost without hesitation, ‘Ile Corce lighthouse.’

Everyone in the wheelhouse was now keeping an eye out to starboard, knowing very well that the Germans only permitted lighthouses to function when they had a convoy on the move.

‘Why not take a rest?’ Mike murmured to Tony, who would be leaving within the hour.

‘I’d rather not.’

Mike understood his feelings. Commanding
Luciole’
s
two small boats demanded not only good judgement but a liberal helping of luck. The two men ventured onto the bridge and saw the swell racing along an outlying reef like a white sea snake. ‘You’ll be fine behind Beguen Island,’ insisted Mike.

Tony shrugged. ‘If our party-goers actually turn out to be there.’

‘They’ll be on Runiou if they’re not.’

‘That’s a great comfort,’ remarked Tony drily.

Mike did not answer. He knew as well as Tony that there were three German blockhouses guarding the foreshore opposite Runiou, and that the
tide-race
between the two islands frightened even local fishermen. Though Tony would be taking a compass (inside a condom to keep it dry) and a waxed chart,
these would be useless in the dark, with rain squalls reducing visibility to a few yards. Even with the help of night glasses, the two men could barely make out the coast.

The agreed signal from the airmen and agents would be a blue light, spelling out the letter ‘
R
’ in morse. Though whether, in the heat of the moment, the correct signal would be given – and whether an incorrect one should actually be ignored – were matters which would soon be out of the hands of those left behind on the trawler.

Not trusting his echo-sounder, Mike ordered a seaman into the bows with a sounding line. The depth was three fathoms as they turned south-east of Beguen with both engines reduced to 600 rpm. The message relayed from the bows, seconds later, was two fathoms.

‘Slow ahead both,’ Mike cried into the engine room voicepipe.

The next depth from the leadsman was one and a half fathoms. On a falling tide they could go no further; Tony would not be sheltered by the mass of Beguen after all.

‘Stop both engines,’ ordered Mike and then, after the answering clangs, ‘Let go.’

As the anchor slipped away silently on its
coir-grass
rope, Tom clamped the rubber-cupped
earphones
of the hydrophone to his head and listened. Suddenly, his expression changed.

‘Fast-moving diesels to the north-west,’ he sighed, handing Mike the earphones.

Mike listened with a sick feeling in his stomach.
‘Uneven beat,’ he muttered. ‘Must be two or more.’

‘I guess they’re the outer screen of a convoy,’ said Tony. ‘The one they lit the lighthouse for.’ Neither he nor anyone else wanted to admit the possibility that these E-boats might be operating alone. If they were, they were probably already homing in on the
MGB
. When Tony left the bridge to join his waiting boat crews, Mike continued listening, hoping in vain to hear the deeper sounds of a convoy. A blazing burst of starshell, out to sea, ended his hopes. When Mike relinquished the headphones he could hear with his own ears the unmistakable mutter of distant E-boats. A moment later, gunfire echoed beyond the islands: a cacophony of six-pounders, 20-mm Oerlikons and Lewis guns. Even if the
MGB
was lucky enough to give the E-boats the slip, she would almost certainly be damaged and therefore unable to do anything further on this mission.
Luciole
would be on her own then, and every man on board was praying that the E-boats’ commanders would not start searching for companion vessels.

As a large searchlight swept the sea north-east of Beguen, Tony reappeared wearing a naval cap and a uniform coat under his life jacket. It consoled Mike to know that, if caught, members of his boat crews would not be executed, this fate being reserved for everyone on the trawler in their fishermen’s clothing. Yet their French identity had to be kept up at all costs. If an E-boat challenged
Luciole
while her boats were ashore, Pierre would shout back in French, claiming to have lost touch with other fishing boats due to mechanical trouble. The searchlight was still
moving, illuminating rocks and islands.

‘Better wait and see what the Germans do at Penhir Fort,’ Mike told Tony. This blockhouse had a field of fire commanding the channel behind Beguen, and was armed with a 76-mm cannon.

After five minutes, the firing at sea stuttered to a halt, and no sound came from the blockhouse. The fainter hydrophone noise suggested the E-boats were moving away to the north. Whether they had sunk the
MGB
or were still pursuing it, Mike had no means of knowing, since his R/T operator was getting nothing on the S-phone link. Ten minutes later the searchlight went out and Mike ordered the boats to be launched.

When they were lowered there were no words of farewell. Silence on deck was a firm rule, with all lights banned, including cigarettes. Steep waves were piling up as the tide flowed out past Beguen and met a freshening wind. Mike smiled down at Tony in the dory, then waved to Petty Officer Ginnery in the dinghy. Tony was taking two ratings as oarsmen, and had a leading seaman in the bows, clutching a sub-machine-gun. In the smaller boat, two oarsmen completed Ginnery’s crew. The rowlocks had been oiled and muffled, and both boats moved away silently.

However many missions Mike went on, it never got any easier waiting for his boats to return. The longer the wait, the worse the strain. The absence of pounding feet on the decks and the unfamiliar silence in galley and engine room always got on his nerves. Staring landwards, he glimpsed heavy
vehicles crawling along the coast road and prayed that enemy troops were not gathering.

Fear licked at
Luciole’
s
hull and rolled under her like an evil reptile. Everyone on board knew that their lives were in the hands of the landing party. If
they
could manage to avoid detection, no searchlight would snap into revealing brilliance; no bursts of tracer rip across the water, leaving
Luciole’
s
decks running like a butcher’s counter. Everything depended on those few men out there in the darkness.

When the boats came in sight again, they were tiny specks, low in the water, battling a wind that moaned in the trawler’s rigging and flung spray from the caps of the waves. For an age, the two dots appeared to make no progress, but the last of the tide was still with them and they came on steadily. As they bumped alongside at last, the oarsmen sagged forward, exhausted. Tony had managed to cram into the dory five unshaven men wearing odd remnants of flying kit, bizarrely augmented with berets and filthy overcoats. Several carried the forks and
baskets
which had helped to disguise them as seaweed gatherers. In the dinghy sat three of the four agents looking more shaken and emotional than the airmen, who, by now, were cheerfully climbing the scramble nets onto the trawler’s afterdeck.

‘No talking till you’re below,’ mouthed Mike in a stage whisper. The way these men thought themselves safe now that they were in the hands of the navy both touched and irritated him. Their relief was wholly understandable; but, since they
must have been told that the wind was blowing straight towards German gun emplacements, their chattering was absurdly irresponsible.

Before rowing away again to pick up more airmen, Tony chose fresh oarsmen for both his boats.

‘Wind’s getting up,’ said Mike, leaning out above Tony’s bobbing dory, wishing he knew how to convey his affection without making the moment harder.

‘Crikey! Is it really?’ muttered Tony.

‘The tide turns in half an hour, so don’t expect any help from that quarter after that.’

‘We’ll do what we can, skip.’

They were both speaking in forced whispers. Mike said, ‘Have you considered putting four oarsmen in the dory and towing the dinghy?’

‘She’d swing too much in this wind.’

Mike nodded. ‘You may be right. Where are the rest of the grey jobs?’

‘On bloody Runiou, worse luck.’

‘Turn back at once if your rowers are tiring. That’s an order.’

‘Sir!’ A hand raised in mock salute.

Mike ignored this. ‘Bloody well come back, okay, and don’t take all night about it.’